27.4.15

23.4.15

Late last year I had the opportunity to visit the US for 2 weeks. I wrote a few notes down and thought I should at least share some of these surface observations. Here they are in no particular order:

•Sandeck uses acrylic yarn
•Dan Flavin's fluorescent lights: are they still manufactured like that or does the museum have to get them custom made?
•Lygia Pape's work is incredible. Makes me realise I know nothing about South American modernism
•Seeing my own feet in Smithson's mirror works made me wonder what sort of shoes people first saw reflected in them
•Dindga McCannon's painting Empress Akweke, 1975
•Beuys' hat is so dramatic!
•Dia: Beacon is a boys club. "Zero" at the Guggenheim was a boys club too
•Cambridge is a liberal town
•Massachusetts was an early abolitionist state
•The US is violent
•Noone knows exactly how many people get shot by police
•Business and enterprise has done toowell
•There is a "Stop & Shop" every 50 yards or so along the highway
•New York talks about itself all the time
•It's mostly myth
•It's also a place of acceptance
•I love gift shops
•Art is made by the living for the living

21.8.14

9.8.14

3.6.14

22.5.14

I went up to Sydney a week ago and managed to catch the end of the Biennale. I took this picture on my last day there. I feel conflicted about writing anything definitive about the BoS/Transfield issue. Partly because there has already been so much coverage of it in the media, perhaps to the detriment of the cause (its easy to get fatigued and disorientated when something is repeated endlessly). Its disturbing how the media really squeezes every bit of value out of an issue. Suffice to say that life isn't getting easier for asylum seekers. Nor is life getting easier for the disadvantaged, poor or marginalised, as both our major political parties move further and further towards 'free' markets and unfettered capitalism. I can't help but feel that we're all inextricably entwined in this system and that finding opportunities to push against it (or just to apprehend it) are rare. While there wasn't much mention of it in the official programme, I thought I should post this photo here.

You can read an interesting discussion of the issue by Danny Butt here

14.5.14

Woke up on Wednesday morning to find the sun shining directly through the crack underneath my door. Once a year alignment maybe.

Edit: Brennan thinks that once a year might be too big of a claim. I'm probably wrong on the science.

4.1.14

Over Christmas I read The Uprising by Franco Berardi. Here is a bit:

Only if we're able to disentangle the future (the perception and conception of the future, and the very production of it) from the traps of growth and investment, will we find and escape from the vicious subjugation of life, wealth and pleasure to the financial abstraction of semio-capital.

The key to this disentanglement may be found in a new form of wisdom which harmonises with exhaustion. Exhaustion is a cursed word in the frame of modern culture, which is based on the cult of energy and the cult of male aggressively. But energy is fading in the postmodern world, for many reasons that are easy to detect.

Energy is fading because of the demographic trend: [human]kind is growing old, as a whole, because the prolongation of life expectancy, and because of the decreasing birth rate. A sense of exhaustion results from this process of general ageing, and what has been considered a blessing – the prolonged life expectancy–may prove to be a misfortune, if the myth of energy is not restrained and replaced with a myth of solidarity and great compassion. Energy is also fading because basic physical resources like oil are doomed to extinction or dramatic reduction. Finally, energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impetus and male aggressively––infighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing.

This is why the future is over, and we are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we are able to come to terms with this postfuturistic condition, we'll renounce accumulation and growth, and will be happy sharing the wealth from our past of industrial labor and from our present of collective intelligence. If we are not able to do this, we will be doomed to a century of violence, misery, and war.
Last year I took stock a bit. I turned 30. I've wondered about my practice of art making and institutional exhibition making. I've also wondered who my people are, and where this has led me. I don't know. But I know there's a lot to do and I hope to do more of it in 2014.

(Sorry about this photo, I saw it in office works yesterday and thought it was pretty wrong on a lot of levels. )

19.8.13

Here are two photos I took of cast concrete forms that have surface imperfections (air bubbles). The first is in Melbourne, and is jammed with cigarette butts. The second photo is from the escalator wall at the NGA, that had built up finger grime left by people ascending and descending the escalator.

8.7.13

11.6.13

I participate in a reading group, where we read theory and discuss it fortnightly. The group isn't about having a perfect knowledge of philosophy, just an interest and opinion. And we drink.readinground.blogspot.com.au